The Missing ‘Swing Voters’ Whose Voices we Need to Hear

Subramaniam "Subbu" Vincent is the director of Journalism & Media Ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics, and a monthly contributor at Forbes. He tweets from @subbuvincent and @jmethics. Views are his own.

This article, "The Missing ‘Swing Voters’ Whose Voices we Need to Hear" originally appeared on Forbes.com and is reprinted with permission.

In the ABC News Harris-Trump debate transcript, search for any of these words in reference to voters: “poverty,” “low income,” “economic hardship,” “struggle,” “working class,” or even the terribly flattening word, “poor.” These terms were uttered exactly zero times, including in questions from moderators. Roughly 67 million people watched the debate, but impoverished Americans did not see questions and responses drawn from their own experiences, beyond “higher prices.” On the other hand, middle class voters were front-and-center. The term “middle class” itself came up six times. Kamala Harris said it five times, and Donald Trump, once. Largely, this was up to the moderators.

Ironically, 10 days before the debate, in a podcast that carried the voices of low income voters outside grocery stores in Wisconsin, New York Times podcast host and political reporter, Astead Herndon, expressed a hope. “My dream one day is like a presidential debate that’s focused directly on these issues, or at least sometimes mentions them. I hope the September 10 debate gets closer to that and we don’t just have middle class, middle class, middle class all over again, because that (sic) sometimes feels like the only place this conversation goes,” said Herndon. He was interviewing his colleague Jason DeParle, a reporter who has covered poverty for nearly 40 years.

Let’s cut to the chase. This year, voters in seven states–Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and North Carolina–are widely expected to decide who becomes president and vice president. The margin of victories in 2020 ranged from 0.2% in Georgia to 1.2% in Pennsylvania to 2.8% in Michigan. In six of the seven states, the winner’s margin was between 10,000 and 80,000 votes. So, not surprisingly, this year, political campaigns, pollsters, and the news media are incessantly focused on the all-critical undecided or swing voters.

But if you consider the language carefully, our television news media do not define and break up undecided voters across income groups. As some examples show, they largely center middle-class and upper-income voters and exclude voting-eligible people who may be struggling to make ends meet or experiencing poverty. This week, a Los Angeles Times article actually invoked the word “categories” for undecided voters and kept income or the class factor out of it. A recent Washington Post article gets deep into “deciders” with no mention of voters experiencing poverty or struggling to make ends meet. The most common category words are “undecided,” “independent,” “double-haters,” “moderates,” “low-information” voters, and so on.

This is not to say that other sophisticated discussions about voter categories are not happening. They are, especially on voters bucketed into race, gender, education, and generation. CBS News recently reported battleground states seeing a spike in voter registration among young women of color. NBC News’ Meet The Press’ former host, Chuck Todd, engaged in a nuanced conversation about the impact of turnout increase amongst Gen Z voters on Kamala Harris’ chances, as a counter to more men voting for Donald Trump. But the same conversation missed discussing the question of how large proportions of poor and low-income voters in the swing states could easily be a factor.

Invisibility in the national discourse and reduced voting power

There is one commonality that runs through political parties, pollsters, and news media when it comes to the elections. It is discomfort with talking about chronic poverty and the concerns of poor Americans.

Responding to Herndon’s concern about what he wanted to see in the debate, DeParle said this: “You’re absolutely correct. In presidential politics, I think both sides worry about being too closely identified with policies towards the poor, because they think it’ll alienate the middle class. Everybody wants to be the champion of the middle class.”

Bishop William J Barber II, founding director of the Center for Public Theology and Public Policy at Yale Divinity School, has long worked at the intersection of poor Americans and voting. He notes often that both Democrats and Republicans have ignored low-income voters for decades precisely because they are unlikely voters. “But when the nonpartisan Poor People’s Campaign, which I serve as a co-chair, surveyed poor people to ask why they don’t vote, the number one reason they gave was, “No one speaks to us,”” writes Barber.

Barber is one of the co-chairs of the Poor People’s Campaign (PPC) a grassroots coalition of various civil society, anti-poverty groups working with low-income people in America across multiple states. He is also the author of the 2024 book, White Poverty: How Exposing Myths About Race and Class Can Reconstruct American Democracy. In the book, Barber quotes Pete Buttigieg, then mayor of South Bend, Indiana, during the latter’s visit to a political candidates forum in December 2019: “Rev, I’m probably not supposed to say this. I might get in trouble for sharing it here. But the reason we don’t talk about poverty is that the consultants tell us not to.”

What journalist DeParle terms as “a profound alienation among poor people and low-income people towards the political system,” echoes poignantly in the low turnout rates of voting-eligible poor Americans. For the 2020 election, U.S. Census data shows that the turnout amongst eligible voters in households with less than $50K annual income was roughly 47%, whereas for all other households (i.e., above $50K) it was roughly 74%. Pew Research Center’s tabulations for 2020 correlating income and voter turnout concurs with this gap.

In short, alienated poor people have not voted in large numbers in recent elections. Political parties have historically found them unreliable or unlikely as voters. Pollsters and the mainstream media simply reflect this reality by making them invisible in their polling, sourcing, and coverage.

Why this is changing and why it must

The PPC’s argument is that the margin of victories (or defeats) in many states, and in particular, the swing states, is vastly smaller than the 20% gap between the lower turnout rate of low-income and higher-income voters. Columbia University microeconomist Rob Hartley wrote about this in a key report for the PPC about this in 2020. For instance, on a baseline of one million low-income voters in any swing state, even if there was a 20% turnout increase, that would be nearly 200,000 more voters showing up. Compare that to 10,000-80,000 vote counts that decide the winners, and you can see why Barber has named a chapter, “Poor People Are The New Swing Vote,” in his book.

But all of this data, categories, and proportions are well understood in the polling and media industries. It is the inclusion and depiction of low-income and poor Americans as voters that is yet to change in national coverage. For political journalism, the manner in which reporters undertake sourcing has to change. National political coverage has a sourcing problem with low-income and poor Americans.

No one says this is an easy problem to solve for the big press. The challenges are many. People experiencing poverty are not going to be ready to talk to journalists parachuting in from far away in one-off conversations. What is in it for them? For my next and concluding article, I spoke to several leading journalists, ethicists, and changemakers. People with a track record. Several local news organizations have also been showing the way. All of them have lessons to offer to make sourcing work. Stay tuned.